`His mission'

CaptionPresident George Bush

AP photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais

"His success is grounded in the fact that when people meet him and get to know him they understand he cares about them. Theyre there because they realize the heart of this guy."  U. S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans

"His success is grounded in the fact that when people meet him and get to know him they understand he cares about them. Theyre there because they realize the heart of this guy."  U. S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans (AP photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Bush, his brother Jeb and a clutch of local Republicans gathered for a late meal in a private dining room of The Colony Beach & Tennis Resort in Longboat Key, Fla., on the night of Sept. 10, 2001. The mood was light.

"He was in great spirits, and he talked about politics," says Jeb Bush, Florida's governor. "He talked about a book that he had just finished, which was "April 1865," just about how tough it was, the decisions that Lincoln had to make and the incredible difficulties and pressures of the job. He seemed to -- even on Sept. 10 -- appreciate the unique challenges presidents have."

None so unique as the morning that followed: As the president listened to 2nd graders in a Sarasota schoolhouse read aloud for him, Bush received a whisper in his ear from his chief of staff advising him that a second airplane had struck the second tower of New York's World Trade Center, his aide surmising: "America is under attack."

It would be two days before Jeb and George Bush spoke again, in a telephone call from the White House. "He sounded resolved," Jeb Bush says. "It was: 'We will respond to this. We will get the job done.' "

How the president chose to respond and "get the job done" have become the defining traits of his presidency and are central to his campaign for a second term. He faces an electorate embodying a very different view of the man they chose as president four years ago.

The straight talker who was embraced in 2000 is seen by many as stubborn today. The supporter who saw resolve four years ago sees a near-zeal. The man who seemed to make a virtue of his flaws in speaking and manner cannot concede a mistake today. Bush has traded in compassion for fear as the armor of his campaign.

In short, the politician who told countless audiences that he was a "uniter, not a divider" in 2000 has, four years later, become one of the nation's more polarizing figures.

Or at least, that is how half of America seems to see him. The other half, however, see steadfastness, strength and clarity of vision. They see a politician who doesn't bend in the wind. They see a president who delivered on the domestic promises of tax cuts and education legislation, and they see a commander in chief who would be the far better protector of the nation than his challenger.

He has achieved a remarkable level of legislative success for an official who came to office without a mandate. A man who many believed would follow the internationalist, coalition-based leanings of his father, instead charted a decidedly different course that in essential ways rewrote the role for America's place in the world.

Like his father, he faces an exceedingly, and in some ways unexpectedly, difficult race for a second term. He has staked his presidency on his ability to keep the nation safe from terrorist attack.

Like the book he had read -- subtitled "The Month That Saved America," a month that ended with Lincoln's assassination -- this president suddenly focused on a nation under historic assault on Sept. 11. And in the days and months that followed, Bush obtained a sense of direction and moral certitude like none he had ever required in a seemingly charmed life.

The way Bush responded, the war he launched against Saddam Hussein, his insistence that the war connected directly to the war against terrorism and his unflinching defense of its largely discredited rationale have not only defined Bush's presidency, but also recast the man. In the process, his personality has become the essence of the referendum on his bid for another four years.

"You can see the weight on him," says Joe O'Neill, a Bush friend since their childhood in Midland, Texas. He calls Bush "the same fun-loving father" who is "happy and loves what he's doing." Yet since 9/11, his friend has lost some of his "old wisecracking" ways and possesses "a much broader realization of the dangers out there."

His response to those dangers has been in many ways to pull inward rather than to reach out. This is a wartime president whose critics say has stopped listening to dissenting points of view, particularly when the subject was the war in Iraq, even from members of his own party such as Sens. Dick Lugar of Indiana, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John McCain of Arizona.

Confusing good and evil

Another ally turned critic is a Christian evangelist whose counsel Bush once sought, fears that a born-again Bush has come to confuse biblical precepts of good and evil with the exigencies of world politics.

"I think he found his mission," says Jim Wallis, leader of a progressive anti-poverty and anti-war Washington-based ministry called the Sojourners. "And all of a sudden, the sense of righteous mission [in Bush] became much stronger."

"Sept. 11 was evil," Wallis adds. "But to say they are evil and we are good leads to bad theology and bad foreign policy, this sort of bipolar view of the world if you are not with us, then you must be the evildoers. That is my concern, theologically, about closing the circle."

While some read his resolve as obstinacy, longtime Bush friend Joe Allbaugh, who managed the 2000 campaign, has another word for it.

"Cockiness is probably the right word," Allbaugh says. "He is a self-assured person. . . . He is comfortable in his own skin as president."

Yet any suggestion that Bush is walled off from necessary criticism or following a religious calling in his crusade against evil is misguided, according to one aide who works closely with him.

"The president is commander-in-chief. He's not chaplain-in-chief," says Jim Towey, a devout Catholic who serves as director of the president's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. "He makes his decisions based on the counsel of pros and cons. I read these accounts of how the president thinks he's getting his words from God. It's just utter nonsense. . . . When he's in the Oval Office, it's all business."

Bush, who came to the Oval Office with the ultimate in legacy admission-tickets, was also, as he might say, misunderestimated at every turn. He won the Republican Party's nomination by consensus, with a mission of fulfilling his own father's foreshortened presidency. He came as a conservative with soft edges, the perfect antidote to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's hard-charging revolution.

Arriving without the benefit of a majority of the popular vote, Bush was able to win far more fights than he lost: Sweeping tax and school reforms that fulfilled campaign pledges his first year in office.

"He's not just this caricature that the left paints of him," Jeb Bush says. "It's completely erroneous. But it has actually helped him during his career, during his elections, because he is underestimated."

But the talent that served him so well as governor of Texas, the ability to work with Democrats, apparently had peaked in Austin. Washington initially united behind the president. Then came war.

Critics say Bush has squandered goodwill both at home and abroad with his determination to take the fight against terrorism to his father's old nemesis of Hussein while Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of Sept. 11, remains at large -- the nation's voters once again riven in camps as polarized as the disputed 2000 election that seated Bush.

"There's a more basic political factor, and that is the president has a commitment to a strategy of no mistakes," says U.S. Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who voted against authorizing the invasion of Iraq. "He repeatedly has been unable to identify any areas of his administrative actions that he would consider to be mistaken and that he would take a different course of action on. That's incredible. I imagine that you and I find several things every day that we would like to redo."

In the swagger that defines Bush's public manner, the president exhorts people on the campaign trail to look "right quick" at the details of his programs as he slams "the fellah" he's running against. The "dead-or-alive" determination that Bush has applied to the war on terrorism -- committed to "striking the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home" -- evokes the Texas range he calls home.

Bush has always made Texas the conceit of his life story, though he was born to a Yankee heritage embodied by his grandfather, U.S. Sen. Prescott Bush (of Connecticut.) and his father, the former President George H.W. Bush.

If his father's business career and political life seemed largely to be one long up escalator, the son's was the opposite. He chose the Texas Air National Guard over combat duty in Vietnam. He lost his first political race, largely failed in the Texas oil trade and was undermined by a life of heavy drinking. But unlike his father's, his is also the story of a life-begins-at-40 kind of redemption when he gave up drinking and seriously took up religion.

From that point, success came far more frequently than failure, first in business as a part owner of the Texas Rangers, then in politics, when he upset incumbent Gov. Ann Richards in 1994 and cruised to re-election in 1998.

The Republican establishment quickly embraced him as their candidate in 2000 and he went on to win the White House in the most contested election in more than a century, thanks in no small measure to a 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Triumph of personality

His victory over Al Gore was, in many ways, a triumph of his personality over his policies.

"His success is grounded in the fact that when people meet him and get to know him they understand he cares about them," says U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans, a longtime Bush friend from Texas, whom Bush appointed to his position. "They're there because they realize the heart of this guy."

Bush plays to that frequently, his sleeves rolled up, the "g's" gone from the end of his words. He trumpets his plain-spoken views but not so much this time around the big heart of compassionate conservatism.

This time, he pummels his rival, Democrat John Kerry, with a litany of exaggerations about the senator's own record, accusing Kerry of promoting a government-run health plan in the nature of "Hillary-care."

His freewheeling attacks are the hallmark of a hard-learned lesson of the 2000 campaign, when Bush suffered a stunning loss to Republican Sen. John McCain in the New Hampshire party primary.

Karen Hughes, a close Bush adviser, says he learns from his mistakes. She points to the sharks swirling around advisers such as Texas-trained, longtime political strategist Karl Rove after that 2000 drubbing.

"A lot of people said, `You ought to fire Karl or somebody,' but he trusted us. We were in this together," Hughes says. "He knew we had to do things differently. . . . "

In that case, different meant far more aggressive and negative in his attacks on McCain. It got him through the primaries and eventually to the White House.

Bush arrived in Washington with an abundance of campaign promises, and courted allies who could help him fulfill them. But what he couldn't foresee, and the impact it would have on him, was Sept. 11.

The soul of the nation

The day after the Supreme Court sealed Bush's disputed election, writer and evangelist Wallis received a call. Bush was convening religious leaders to discuss his plans for "faith-based initiatives" in social services, and Wallis joined two dozen in a Sunday school classroom in Austin.

"It was a very diverse group. It wasn't a group that always agreed with him," Wallis recalls. "He sat down and mostly listened. . . . He asked questions like, `How do I speak to the soul of the nation?"'

But the next time Wallis met Bush, at a White House function in February 2002, he found Bush unreceptive. Wallis tried to tell Bush that the war on terrorism was at its heart a war on poverty. Wallis says that was the last time he was invited to the White House.

"Over the next year he began to do the run-up to Iraq, and at that point I think he really did close the circle of the people he was listening to," says Wallis, author of "Faith Works," a book Bush had boasted of reading. "Because he was a religious man, maybe we could have a conversation. . . . When we went to war, I knew that wouldn't happen."

Bush has lost a get-along approach that won him the heart of a Democratic lieutenant governor in Texas and helped enact some of his agenda there.

The spirit of cooperation that pervaded Bush's first year, particularly his education reforms, seems a distant memory today.

"He is disappointed that he has not been able to do a better job of changing the tone in Washington," Hughes says. "It's something on his list that he wants to work on, to make a renewed effort to try to reduce the negativity and polarization of Washington."

If he is disappointed, Graham says, Bush has himself to blame.

"He certainly was aware of what the environment was in Washington when he ran, and he said he was going to change the atmosphere," says Graham, who briefly waged his own campaign for president. "Other than the events that surrounded and immediately followed Sept. 11, it's hard for me to think of many initiatives the president has taken which had as their objective to unify the country."

For now, it is a warrior's mantle that Bush counts on for re-election. This is the image Hughes saw, standing alongside Allbaugh, the day Bush stood atop the World Trade Center wreckage with a rescue worker's bullhorn vowing revenge.

"I turned to Joe Allbaugh, and I said, `America has just seen the George Bush we know,"' Hughes says. "He has always been focused. He is just more so. I think it really brought out his strength as a leader."

Bush retells the tale of the bullhorn at campaign stop after stop, insisting he took the attack on his nation "personally." He maintains that this unforeseen era cries out for a leader, and if his moral certitude for the task at hand strikes critics as obstinacy, Bush presents it as commitment.

"Knowing what I know today," Bush has told campaign audience after audience about the war, "I would have made the same decision."

In that one sentence is both the challenge and the opportunity this President Bush faces less than a week before the election. Will voters ratify the certitude that Bush says was forged on Sept. 11, or will they reject it?